What are examples of off-page SEO?

Short answer

Earned links from relevant sites, local press and industry coverage, supplier and partner listings, reviews, a complete Business Profile, consistent citations, and being quoted as an expert. What they share is that a real person might see them. The examples that cost money and do little are the ones built only for search engines.

Lists of off-page techniques tend to mix things that work with things that stopped working a decade ago, and present them as equals. So here are examples grouped by what they are worth in practice, from the work I actually do and the cleanup I am regularly hired for.

Examples that consistently work

Supplier, manufacturer and partner links. If you stock a brand, are certified by a manufacturer or work alongside another business, there is often a “where to buy”, “installers” or “partners” page you belong on. Relevant, permanent, and frequently overlooked.
Local press and community coverage. A local paper writing about a project, a sponsorship of a team or event, a feature in a regional business publication. For local businesses these carry real weight.
Industry associations and professional bodies. Member directories, accreditation listings, conference speaker pages. Trust signals as much as links.
Original data or research. A survey, a cost breakdown, an analysis of your own job records. Journalists and bloggers link to numbers they cannot get elsewhere.
Expert commentary. Answering journalists’ requests for comment in your field. Slow, but the links are on sites people read.
Reclaiming unlinked mentions and broken links. Sites that already mention you without linking, or link to a page of yours that no longer exists. Some of the easiest wins available.

The common thread is a reason. Each of those links exists because the linking site has a genuine reason to point at you. Ahrefs found that the traffic of the pages linking to you correlated with rankings better than the number of links, across 44,589 keywords. Links on pages people actually visit are the ones that count.

Examples for local businesses specifically

Your Google Business Profile, fully completed and kept current. A steady flow of recent reviews and responses to them. Consistent name, address and phone number on the main directories and data sources for your country and industry. Listings on local chamber of commerce and business association sites.

Google says local prominence is based partly on information about a business from across the web, like links, articles and directories, plus review count and score. For a plumber or a clinic, these are the off-page signals that most directly move the map pack.

Examples that cost money and usually do little

Submitting to hundreds of general directories. A handful of relevant ones help with consistency. The hundredth does nothing.

Paid guest posts on sites that exist to sell guest posts. Google’s spam policies name large-scale guest posting with keyword-rich anchors as link spam.

Link packages sold by quantity. Ten links a month for a fixed price, from wherever they can be found.

Forum signatures, blog comments and profile links. Usually nofollowed, almost always ignored.

Social media posting as an SEO tactic. Social profiles help people find and trust you, and they are worth keeping active for that. Shares and likes are not a ranking signal you can build.

How I would choose where to start

Begin with what you already have. Make a list of every supplier, partner, association, client and local organisation you have a real relationship with. Check which of them has a page you belong on and are not on. That list is usually worth more than any outreach campaign, and costs only a few emails.

Next, check for mentions of your business that do not link to you, and links pointing at pages on your site that now return a 404. Fix those.

Then, if you need more, make something worth citing. Data from your own work is the most reliable option I know. I wrote about why great content does not earn links on its own; someone still has to tell the right people it exists.

What to measure

Not the number of links. Track which pages earn them, whether those pages gain impressions and positions over the following months, and whether the links come from sites your customers might actually read. A report that only counts links tells you about effort, not results.

A worked example

Take a roofing company. It installs one manufacturer’s shingles and is listed as a certified installer, but the manufacturer’s installer finder links to an old domain. It sponsors a youth football team whose site lists sponsors without links. The local paper covered a storm recovery job two years ago and named the company without linking. And it is a member of the regional contractors’ association, whose directory has the wrong phone number.

None of that requires new content or a budget. It requires four emails and an afternoon. Between them, those fixes give the company relevant, local, permanent links and a consistent business record, which is more than most monthly link packages deliver in a year. Most businesses I work with have a list like this sitting unused.

If you want off-page work built on links you would be happy to show a client, my link building service starts with what you already have and builds outward, steadily.